The Witness to Guantanamo Project

The goal of the Witness to Guantanamo Project (W2G) is to film in-depth interviews of hundreds of former Guantanamo detainees and archive the videos for history. It is our hope that revealing and preserving the truth of what happened at Guantanamo will help ensure that justice is ultimately achieved for those who were imprisoned and abused for years at the Guantanamo facility without charges and, for years, without access to lawyers.

Cumulatively, these interviews will shed light on this sad chapter in American history. The assembled narratives will be an invaluable resource for present and future generations of scholars, historians, journalists, documentarians, and others who are dedicated to the truth and the pursuit of justice. This project will also be helpful in securing social, economic, and legal rights for those men who were unjustly detained.

We are using the "Shoah" model -- in which Holocaust survivors were interviewed and videotaped to ensure that the history of the Holocaust was accurately preserved -- to archive video footage as insurance against denials of torture, abuse and rule of law violations by U.S. authorities.

Recently, W2G completed a pilot project of filming in-depth narrative interviews with 16 former detainees in five countries. Among these 16 participants, we found common experiences in their capture and imprisonment.

One case that was particularly disturbing in our interviews is that of Uygher Ayub Muhammed. He was just 16 years old when he was taken into custody in Pakistan. After imprisonment and torture in Kandihar, he was sent to Guantanamo. He was released after several years in prison. He was told by U.S. authorities that he was "in the wrong place at the wrong time” as an explanation for the years he lost. He cannot return to his home in East Turkistan because it has been governed by the Chinese since 1949 and they would imprison, and possibly torture, him. Ayub has been released to Albania—a poor country whose language and culture are unknown to him—far from his friends and family, and without a job.

The project has received domestic and international in-kind assistance from organizations and individuals, including the Center for Constitutional Rights, Reprieve (London), the University of San Francisco, NGOs, professors, lawyers, activists, and many former detainees themselves. More than $100,000 has been raised for the project and several proposals are currently pending.

The Project is being led by Professor Peter Jan Honigsberg, a law professor at the University of San Francisco. He is the author of Our Nation Unhinged: The Human Consequences of the War on Terror (2009); has visited Guantanamo; teaches, lectures and writes on terrorism, civil liberties and national security issues; and serves on several human rights advocacy groups. Professor Honigsberg is responsible for directing the project, hiring staff and consultants, and conducting several of the interviews. He also has direct oversight and responsibility for the creation of the film archive.

The Witness to Guantanamo Project has important work to do. It is the only project that is systematically collecting and preserving the experiences of former detainees through a series of filmed narratives. These men want their stories told. Former detainee Haj Boudella eloquently stated during his interview in August 2009, "If you are holding a tree, even on the day of judgment you need to plant the tree for future generations." As a global community trying to untangle the legacy of the War on Terror, we need their stories to be told and preserved for future generations and for the protection of human rights.

witnesstoguantanamo.com

Kimberly Theidon is a member of the Advisory Board.

El Dorado: Coca, Conflict and Control in the Apurímac and Ene River Valley, Peru

Funding from the Social Science Research Council: Global Security and Cooperation and The Wenner Gren Foundation. This is a collaborative project with José Coronel Aguirre and interns from Praxis

“States of Concern: Coca, Conflict and Control in the Apurímac and Ene River Valley” is an ethnographically grounded study of alternative development, the administration of conflict, and forms of governmentality in the foremost coca growing region of Peru. We take the Apruímac and Ene Valley and the cocaleros’ movement as an organizing frame for examining how coca eradication efforts and the alternative development programs that accompany them create the conditions for a resurgence of political violence in a region characterized by multiple armed actors and massive discontent.

We understand governmentality as a way of shaping conduct and securing rule through a multiplicity of authorities and agencies inside and outside of the state, and at levels ranging from the transnational to the national to the administration of forms of life. We propose a multilevel analysis that will allow us to trace the shift from neocolonial disciplinary techniques to globalized regulatory regimes that take subjectivity and conduct as their fields of intervention and control.

The organizational innovations characteristic of the post-Cold War merging of aid, development and security call for a place-based study of how this emerging form of global governance is spatialized onto territory and the inhabitants therein. We argue for examining the structures of conflict and historicizing the violence in the VRAE. We emphasize the importance of regional histories when designing policy recommendations, convinced that “theoretically informed particularity” (Hale 2002) can lead to alternatives to alternative development.

We consider this one of the most pressing social issues in the Andean Region. Our proposed research in the VRAE provides an important comparative component to our research in Colombia and Ecuador by allowing us to analyze both the local and regional manifestations of coca, conflict and control. We believe that current counter-narcotics and anti-terrorism policies create the conditions for escalating violence; thus our research has an explicitly preventive aim. By conducting research with both the cocaleros as well as the myriad national and transnational entities with which they interact, we aim to build on people’s struggle for the defense of life and livelihood by generating policy alternatives to current counternarcotics and antiterrorism interventions.

Transistional Subjects: Demobilizing Combatants in Colombia

A key component of peace processes and post-conflict reconstruction is the disarmament, demobilization and reintegration (DDR) of excombatants. DDR programs imply multiple transitions: from the combatants who lay down their weapons, to the governments that seek an end to armed conflict, to the communities that receive — or reject — these demobilized fighters. At each level, these transitions imply a complex and dynamic equation between the demands of peace and the clamor for justice. And yet, traditional approaches to DDR have focused almost exclusively on military and security objectives, which in turn has resulted in these programs being developed in relative isolation from the growing field of transitional justice and its concerns with historical clarification, justice, reparations and reconciliation. I am currently conducting research in Colombia, a case of great interest because the government is attempting to implement mechanisms of reparations and reconciliation in a "pre post-conflict" context, and to implement DDR on the terrain of transitional justice.